'As God is My Witness, I Thought Obamacare Could Fly'

Abbott Laboratories chief executive Miles White said something last Tuesday that should jolt tens of millions of Americans who watch from a comfortable distance as the giant Obamacare blimp ignites and tumbles to the ground. These Americans are safely ensconced in employer-provided health care coverage — for now. But there are "clear incentives for companies to drop their health care plans and move people onto the exchanges," White told analysts at a luncheon, referring to the disastrously cranky and unreliable online insurance marketplaces created under Obamacare. "I can tell you that the employees of Abbott or AbbVie (the pharmaceutical firm Abbott spun off in January) are going to be pretty unhappy about that, you know, if we did that," White said. If President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders think the outcry against Obamacare is fierce now, watch if millions more Americans get blindsided with the news that they'll be forced into these dysfunctional government online marketplaces. Some will face higher premiums or higher deductibles, and they'll be required to share private medical and financial information on a website with a questionable security firewall, opening them to fraudsters, hackers and cyberchaos.

The president styles himself a committed pragmatist. At a fundraiser outside of Seattle the other day, he averred, “I’m not a particularly ideological person.” He just happened to risk Democratic control of Congress to advance the cause of nationalized health insurance. And happened to insist on the left-most plausible version of the law. And happened to defend it with every power at his disposal. In private, as I wrote here, the president admits that he has kept his true ideological self carefully under wraps. According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the authors of Double Down, Obama brought up climate change in a political strategy meeting in 2011 as an example of his undue caution. “Maybe I should just come out and say what I really feel about this,” he said. “Maybe I should just go out and say what I think about everything.” As a crazy thought experiment, his aides let him dabble with heart-felt sincerity. He brought a list to the next meeting of causes dear to him, all of which were liberal clichés: climate change, immigration reform, poverty, Israeli-Palestinian peace, closing Gitmo, and gay marriage. Only the very last, gay marriage, made a major appearance in the presidential campaign because he couldn’t bear any longer to hide what he really thought about it. He knew the danger of too much forthrightness.

But he's hoping his supporters will be forthright in their blind enthusiasm for his signature program tomorrow, when they go to break bread and eat turkey (and/or Vegan substitutes thereof) with the non-believers. Or as Betsy Newmark writes today, "Liberals have a different view of Thanksgiving:"

What kind of view of the family do liberals have that they are urging their followers to take advantage of Thanksgiving get-togethers to propagandize their family with "the talk." When I was growing up, "the talk" was not something that happened at the dinner table and it didn't concern health insurance. It certainly didn't include people downloading talking points from the President's activism website to have that "talk." But times change. The DCCC also has recommendations for to say for that "crazy Tea Party Relative (or two) who just loves bashing President Obama" that "we all have." My experience is that liberals are much more likely to bring up their political opinions and just assume that everyone agrees with them. Maybe that is because I work with teachers, who trend liberal, and most of the rest of my family beyond my immediate relatives, are Democrats. I tend to not bring up my political beliefs at all unless asked and I try to be pretty low key. I know I'm in the political minority at work and I also don't believe in spouting off about politics in front of students. And I really see such assumptions that every teacher must be liberal when I'm at seminars or symposia of teachers. But time after time, I've heard others make statements that just assume that everyone is on the same page with them. It is as if it doesn't even occur to them that someone they know and work with could hold a different political position. I still remember the horror expressed in the teacher seminar I attend the day after the 1994 elections. It was as if it didn't occur to any of those teachers that there might be a Republican in their midst who was happy about those results. I shudder to imagine how uncomfortable it would be if I looked at these interactions as opportunities to spout political talking points. But the left looks at such gatherings differently.

Talk slowly and calmly; the amount of flop sweat emanating from the White House and onto its true belivers must be palpable right now. For everyone else, have a joyous Thanksgiving, starting with this holiday classic about a very different turkey that falls to earth: